No need. Let’s get into it.
No. 3 – LBRY Loses SEC Lawsuit
Decentralized media platform LBRY this week lost its lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which had accused the project of selling unlicensed securities through its LBC token.
The judge agreed that LBC tokens should be considered securities, a verdict that LBRY said sets a “an extraordinarily dangerous precedent” and paved the way for every single cryptocurrency bar bitcoin to be classed as a security.
As a result, LBRY can expect a rather large fine in the coming months.
No. 2 – 50,000 BTC Seized From Silk Road Hacker
This week saw the revelation that over ₿50,000 was seized last year from a Georgia resident who stole it from Silk Road in 2012. James Zhong was tracked down after he sent some of the stolen funds to an exchange, leading to police raiding his house and seizing ₿50,676 in hardware wallets and in Casascius coins, as well as over $700,000 in cash and metals.
Zhong gamed Silk Road by finding a way to withdraw huge amounts of bitcoin after creating new accounts and depositing a small amount, walking away with the haul and doing almost nothing with it. This was probably out of fear of getting caught, but he was caught anyway after he sent a small bit to an unnamed exchange.
The moral of the story? If you’re going to steal masses of bitcoin, spend it before they catch you.
No.1 – FTX Implodes
Of course, the biggest story of the week (and the year) was FTX imploding in spectacular fashion, locking billions of dollars of customer funds as it went down. The story is too huge to compact into a couple of paragraphs, so here’s how we navigated it this week:
- Monday – Binance fires shots by announcing FTT sale
- Tuesday – FTT price collapses after Binance carries out sale threat
- Wednesday – FTX begs for a bailout, resulting in Binance considering buying FTX
- Thursday – Binance pulls out of the deal and Justin Sun says that multiple parties are working on a solution
- Friday – BlockFi announces it was halting withdrawals, citing impact of FTX; FTX customers are bribing employees to get their withdrawals through; FTX files for chapter 11 bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried resigns.
There is undoubdedly more to come from this scandal, but that’s not bad for five days…
Honorable Mentions
This week we also learnt that:
- OpenSea rowed back on its plans to scrap compulsory royalties on NFT sales after community backlash
- Exchanges will begin publishing their reserves in a show of transparency
- The Celebrity EthereumMax promoters stand a good chance of winning their class action lawsuit brought by EMAX buyers
We’ll be back next week for another review of the week’s top crypto news, although whether it can top this week is doubtful.
